The Exchanges

Q Can we take one, apply systems design in a way that you did, just so we can understand that in a more contextual manner?

A Yeah, so let's, the first job I had at Notion was actually, like, the three people reported to me were support, customer support, right? Now, typically, as the number of tickets or as the number of requests go up, um, The first thing that people typically do is they just add more people. They sort of like divide the tickets by productivity, and then they come up with some number of people. Uh, the product manager in me was like, well, we could build a better system. So we could build better tools so that each support person can do more every day. But also, you know, once you have enough of these, uh, customer tickets, then the next role you want to hire would be Something called a product ops, right? Product ops would take all this feedback and synthesize it and, and share it with the engineers. So one thing Ivan and I did in the, in the early years was, um, we created this like canonical database of about 200 types of requests that would come, which would map to like features, right? And we trained our support team to tag every request that come in With one of those two on attacks, you have to do that, right? That was part of the job. And every morning at six AM, we wrote a script, which would take all these tags from intercom and write it against these database tags in notion. And so essentially what. Every engineer at notion had was a real time view of what people were talki…

AI assessment note: “we created this like canonical database of about 200 types of requests”

Q Never wise to pick a fight with Jan Hammer, but you did also just lead the deal into Notion. So actually, how did you come to be at Notion and be COO today?

A Yeah, so I've known Ivan for almost a decade now. Ivan, who's the CEO of Notion, I tried to hire him for my previous company at Pulse, And I failed. So a couple years later, when we sold Pulse to LinkedIn in 2013, I had this newfound money that I didn't know what to do. And Notion was my first investment. And for many years, I thought I lost all my money in Notion because it hadn't launched a product for, I think, four years. And then when it did in 2017, it took off. A year later, I found myself having breakfast with Ivan and just looking at just how the market was pulling Notion, just like how much demand there was. I thought it was a really good time to jump in and help scale the business. So I joined 18 months ago as the ninth employee. Been so much fun building it up.

AI assessment note: “joined 18 months ago as the ninth employee”

Q Never wise to pick a fight with Jan Hammer, but you did also just lead the deal into Notion. So actually, how did you come to be at Notion and be COO today?

A Yeah, so I've known Ivan for almost a decade now. Ivan, who's the CEO of Notion, I tried to hire him for my previous company at Pulse, And I failed. So a couple years later, when we sold Pulse to LinkedIn in 2013, I had this newfound money that I didn't know what to do. And Notion was my first investment. And for many years, I thought I lost all my money in Notion because it hadn't launched a product for, I think, four years. And then when it did in 2017, it took off. A year later, I found myself having breakfast with Ivan and just looking at just how the market was pulling Notion, just like how much demand there was. I thought it was a really good time to jump in and help scale the business. So I joined 18 months ago as the ninth employee. Been so much fun building it up.

AI assessment note: “I thought it was a really good time to jump in and help scale”

Q Can we take one, apply systems design in a way that you did, just so we can understand that in a more contextual manner?

A Yeah, so let's, the first job I had at Notion was actually, like, the three people reported to me were support, customer support, right? Now, typically, as the number of tickets or as the number of requests go up, um, The first thing that people typically do is they just add more people. They sort of like divide the tickets by productivity, and then they come up with some number of people. Uh, the product manager in me was like, well, we could build a better system. So we could build better tools so that each support person can do more every day. But also, you know, once you have enough of these, uh, customer tickets, then the next role you want to hire would be Something called a product ops, right? Product ops would take all this feedback and synthesize it and, and share it with the engineers. So one thing Ivan and I did in the, in the early years was, um, we created this like canonical database of about 200 types of requests that would come, which would map to like features, right? And we trained our support team to tag every request that come in With one of those two on attacks, you have to do that, right? That was part of the job. And every morning at six AM, we wrote a script, which would take all these tags from intercom and write it against these database tags in notion. And so essentially what. Every engineer at notion had was a real time view of what people were talki…

AI assessment note: “we created this like canonical database of about 200 types of requests”

Q So I, I'm loving this and kind of continuing to write here notes, but you said that about kind of enduring the pain. That kind of goes in stark contrast to what we're told, which is the speed of execution is the most important thing in relatively early stage companies. The willingness to wait goes against that. How do you think about that and the importance of speed?

A Well, I think, I don't know. I think we took a slightly different approach where we, we, we did try to, um, keep the team lean. Um, and we felt like it might feel like short term, It, it's slowing us down, but in the long term, keeping the team small allowed us to move a lot faster. I think even if I think about today, like all of Notion, with all the different surfaces we have, we have under 20 product managers, and we have about 12 designers. 12 designers sort of designed the entire sort of surface of Notion, including Calendar, um, and it really allows us to move faster. Like, it's not a committee of design or committee of product managers where someone's only responsible for a very small part of the problem. Because we have a, we are a lean team, uh, we can actually take a little bit longer because we're not trying to hire a lot more people. We're trying to hire maybe a couple people every year, and it also forces a certain prioritization that, that makes you a lot more effective, right? Instead of just taking the fundraising money that you took Hiding a lot of people saying yes to all the projects. I think that is actually comes at a cost. The cost is that your bandwidth is now split among so many different projects. I think you may feel like you're going faster, uh, by hiring more people and saying yes to more projects, but in effect it is actually going slower. So we've …

AI assessment note: “keeping the team small allowed us to move a lot faster.”

Q So I, I'm loving this and kind of continuing to write here notes, but you said that about kind of enduring the pain. That kind of goes in stark contrast to what we're told, which is the speed of execution is the most important thing in relatively early stage companies. The willingness to wait goes against that. How do you think about that and the importance of speed?

A Well, I think, I don't know. I think we took a slightly different approach where we, we, we did try to, um, keep the team lean. Um, and we felt like it might feel like short term, It, it's slowing us down, but in the long term, keeping the team small allowed us to move a lot faster. I think even if I think about today, like all of Notion, with all the different surfaces we have, we have under 20 product managers, and we have about 12 designers. 12 designers sort of designed the entire sort of surface of Notion, including Calendar, um, and it really allows us to move faster. Like, it's not a committee of design or committee of product managers where someone's only responsible for a very small part of the problem. Because we have a, we are a lean team, uh, we can actually take a little bit longer because we're not trying to hire a lot more people. We're trying to hire maybe a couple people every year, and it also forces a certain prioritization that, that makes you a lot more effective, right? Instead of just taking the fundraising money that you took Hiding a lot of people saying yes to all the projects. I think that is actually comes at a cost. The cost is that your bandwidth is now split among so many different projects. I think you may feel like you're going faster, uh, by hiring more people and saying yes to more projects, but in effect it is actually going slower. So we've …

AI assessment note: “in the long term, keeping the team small allowed us to move a lot faster.”

Q Akshay, what's your superpower and then your weakness in company building? 30 seconds on each.

A I'm really good at the zero to one part. I think you can throw me pretty much any problem inside the company and I could get you to a version of product market fit there. I'm a product guy. I've kind of done product things over the last decade, but in that notion, I'm doing everything except And I think I can get ramped up really fast and solve company problems. I'm probably not the best at scaling, so the one to 10 is probably something that I don't enjoy as much. I probably get bored, and so the way I've solved that for myself over the last few years has just been surrounding myself with people who are extremely good at scaling.

AI assessment note: “I'm really good at the zero to one part... I'm probably not the best at scaling”

Q spoke to many people before the show. Basically, he's talked the shit out of you. Uh, and what I heard was actually that you have had so many different hats across the Notion journey, from CMO to CFO to Head of Inside Sales, CHRO, Head of IR, CPO, I mean, Christ, I hope you're accumulating different salaries for this. How did you learn new disciplines so quickly on the job?

A I didn't really think of my job as those titles. Like, I think I, I, I, my job was COO, uh, and, and in many ways, I, my, my primary job was to like help scale the business and the company and let my co-founders, Ivan and Simon, stay focused on the product. And, and so that meant whatever the company needed, I would jump in and try to figure it out. Um, how did I do it? This is actually kind of interesting. So, so my background is product, right? And, and, and, and Ivan told me to join and take care of everything except product. And so I was, I essentially put myself on all these new functions and, um, and, and just try to learn on the job. So one thing I realized was even though I had never really done any of these things before, Actually, like, first principles thinking and, like, systems design that you learn in product development actually, like, applies a lot to these functions too.

AI assessment note: “first principles thinking and, like, systems design that you learn in product development”

Q What was the hardest team to hire and the hardest function to build out?

A The one I would change a lot if I, if I could, or the one that I, I probably regret not doing the right way is probably sales. I, I was optimistic. I, I thought like, you know, I, I think we could do sales a different way. Uh, and I thought our sales people could be more consultative. They don't have to worry about Coda. They just have to, like, make sure the customer is being successful and the product will grow and expand. And what I learned the hard way is that, A, like, I think we tried to reinvent the wheel on something that has been done in a specific way that does work really, really well that we shouldn't have. But B, like, I think the, the thing that I, I misunderstood was actually some of the best salespeople They join because there is a quota, because they can hit a number, because they can outperform that number. And so actually not having that and not having, you know, the, the attribution, uh, really hurt us, I think the first year or two.

AI assessment note: “regret not doing the right way is probably sales.”

Q When you look back, what have been some of the biggest mistakes you've made, and what are some big lessons from those?

A People who do well at Notion are builders, and we sort of expect even the execs and leaders to be builders, and so I think when we hired people who are VPs or CXOs at, you know, big tech firms, um, I think they have a machinery around how their work happens, And because Notion is so small and so lean, I think those people had a tough time, uh, at Notion because, A, like, that machinery didn't exist, but also when we did have crisis or moment of, like, solution that needed to be found, I think they typically sort of went to needing another headcount or, or, uh, Or, or sort of blaming on the systems or so forth, right, which actually didn't work so well.

AI assessment note: “when we hired people who are VPs or CXOs at big tech firms”

Q quite a few people that start very nimble, and they're really aligned to how you built the company, and then with a hundred million around, or with that big mouth, ah, you know what, we can hire that extra, we can hire, we can start that new division, we can go into enterprise early, we can do X. How did you prevent the creep with the increased brand in cash?

A The best power founder has is like the veto power. Uh, and, and Ivan used that a lot when I was in the early days, like, you know, I remember, I don't know how many, uh, salespeople we'd interviewed, uh, for the first six months, and Ivan was like, well, this person's quite good, but not great, so let's keep looking. I think for up to about 500 people, we're about 700 people today, but up to 500 people, the last interview was always with Ivan or myself. So we, we met literally everyone, uh, before. And, uh, in many cases, even, and because we did that, I think it already sort of forced a certain rigor inside the company, but also in general, we were okay with enduring the pain. Like we, we were okay, um, like a lot of times you feel like this person needed to be hired yesterday and, and we would be okay waiting a few weeks, a few months until we found the best person for that job.

AI assessment note: “up to 500 people, the last interview was always with Ivan or myself.”

Q What do you want in the recruits that you have to your board?

A So actually, like, this is something we've been thinking a lot about, and actually, it's actually not that different from thinking about recruiting an executive team. You know, I can just give in, like, maybe, maybe if there's, like, five seats, um, that we would want to fill, I think I would want one person to be like a CEO whisperer, almost like a CEO coach, uh, ideally like a former CEO who's done that job. Um, I think CFOs always would like a partner in, uh, having an amazing audit chair. Um, then there's probably a person who's in go-to-market, uh, and this could be like either someone who's deep in sales or deep in marketing, and you can pick whichever one you need Like you're going to need help with in the long run. Then there's the other, uh, like the governance and like the compensation committee is typically a person who you could match with your head of people. And what you could do if you design it this way, you could also, let's say, you know, fifth one is an investor who actually gives you like a macro perspective or how things are going on. But if you design this well, you could almost have a, like a one on one to one coach for your executive team to your board That you, that you sort of put together, where they, as they're growing in their careers and they're sort of like figuring out the next phase and the next phase after that, they have an incredible board me…

AI assessment note: “I think I would want one person to be like a CEO whisperer”

Q billion. I mean, that's a weird raise in the way, I mean, it's brilliant raise. But in the ways that it's minimal dilution actually, but a lot of money. Fifty million buys a lot, a lot. And so the traditional notion is, well, VCs wouldn't like that because they can't get the ownership that they need. How do you think about that? Raise the structure of it. I'm just fascinated.

A It actually came about really fast, um, uh, and actually goes back to being cash flow positive and not needing it. I think you sort of are able to do- You're able to break the rules. You're able to break the rules because there's more demand than, than, than, uh, than supply. Um, but, but, but, but, you know, the reason we raised that round was also, I think was an interesting one where we didn't have a need for fifty million dollars. But we raised it because we saw that the, the talent was, was flocking to safety. Well, all the people we wanted to hire needed some signal to say, like, oh, this company is stable, and I, and I'm willing to work there. Uh, and so in March or April, 2020, Again, we didn't have the cash needs, but we needed an index and co-to stamp that, hey, I'm putting fifty million dollars in this company that is growing and that actually really helped us recruit and like break that.

AI assessment note: “You're able to break the rules because there's more demand than, than, than, uh, than supply.”

Q What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

A One of the things, uh, I think my wife was right on this one, one of the things I used to do about a year or two was try to, like, pack up every hour of my kids' weekend, uh, with, like, activities, and I was like, oh, they can't be bored, like, they gotta do this, they gotta do that, and then, you know, we just spent, like, a month in India this summer, And they had no programming, and they were just, like, sitting around with family, and in many cases, my, my daughter complained she was bored, but I think, I don't know, I think, I, I think both of them grew so much with all these interactions, and I've realized that, you know, you don't, I don't know, boredom is good. Like, I think it's okay for them to, like, just, you know, uh, not be, like, occupied every hour of Of the, of the day.

AI assessment note: “I've realized that, you know, you don't, I don't know, boredom is good.”

Q quite a few people that start very nimble, and they're really aligned to how you built the company, and then with a hundred million around, or with that big mouth, ah, you know what, we can hire that extra, we can hire, we can start that new division, we can go into enterprise early, we can do X. How did you prevent the creep with the increased brand in cash?

A The best power founder has is like the veto power. Uh, and, and Ivan used that a lot when I was in the early days, like, you know, I remember, I don't know how many, uh, salespeople we'd interviewed, uh, for the first six months, and Ivan was like, well, this person's quite good, but not great, so let's keep looking. I think for up to about 500 people, we're about 700 people today, but up to 500 people, the last interview was always with Ivan or myself. So we, we met literally everyone, uh, before. And, uh, in many cases, even, and because we did that, I think it already sort of forced a certain rigor inside the company, but also in general, we were okay with enduring the pain. Like we, we were okay, um, like a lot of times you feel like this person needed to be hired yesterday and, and we would be okay waiting a few weeks, a few months until we found the best person for that job.

AI assessment note: “The best power founder has is like the veto power.”

Q When you look back, what have been some of the biggest mistakes you've made, and what are some big lessons from those?

A People who do well at Notion are builders, and we sort of expect even the execs and leaders to be builders, and so I think when we hired people who are VPs or CXOs at, you know, big tech firms, um, I think they have a machinery around how their work happens, And because Notion is so small and so lean, I think those people had a tough time, uh, at Notion because, A, like, that machinery didn't exist, but also when we did have crisis or moment of, like, solution that needed to be found, I think they typically sort of went to needing another headcount or, or, uh, Or, or sort of blaming on the systems or so forth, right, which actually didn't work so well.

AI assessment note: “when we hired people who are VPs or CXOs at, you know, big tech firms”

Q What was the hardest team to hire and the hardest function to build out?

A The one I would change a lot if I, if I could, or the one that I, I probably regret not doing the right way is probably sales. I, I was optimistic. I, I thought like, you know, I, I think we could do sales a different way. Uh, and I thought our sales people could be more consultative. They don't have to worry about Coda. They just have to, like, make sure the customer is being successful and the product will grow and expand. And what I learned the hard way is that, A, like, I think we tried to reinvent the wheel on something that has been done in a specific way that does work really, really well that we shouldn't have. But B, like, I think the, the thing that I, I misunderstood was actually some of the best salespeople They join because there is a quota, because they can hit a number, because they can outperform that number. And so actually not having that and not having, you know, the, the attribution, uh, really hurt us, I think the first year or two.

AI assessment note: “or the one that I, I probably regret not doing the right way is probably sales.”

Q What does being cashflow positive mean you have done that you wouldn't have done if you weren't cashflow positive? Like what has it enabled you?

A It's a huge, like once you get there, it's actually a, a huge time save. So I think I'll just talk a little bit about notions, very nuanced, but we got there pretty early. I think we got there like five years ago. What it did was it meant that suddenly you feel in control of your destiny. You don't have to think about, you don't, you don't have an end date, right? You, you don't feel like you're going to run out of money in X months or X years, Y years away. And what that means is you can choose to raise money if you have a good need for it. But you don't have to. Uh, so all the time spent there could be spent back into building a better product and, and selling to customers.

AI assessment note: “all the time spent there could be spent back into building a better product”

Q We mentioned Pat. We mentioned index. We mentioned code too. When investors invest and lead and write big checks, they generally get board seats. You did boards a little bit differently. How did you do a board differently actually?

A Well, I think like, you know, we talked about these rounds. These rounds were, uh, fairly Low dilution. I think there's essentially two to three percent ownership, um, that we, that we, we gave out. Uh, and so, you know, we were able to essentially, um, not give out board seats. I don't think it came from, like, a place of arrogance, but I think it just, it, it just, like, we were able to do it in a way that, um, that, that, that sort of, like, felt like we could almost recruit a board In the future, which we wanted to do, not just because someone is investing money, but someone who could be a long-term sort of board member for us.

AI assessment note: “we were able to essentially, um, not give out board seats.”

Q Akshay, what's your superpower and then your weakness in company building? 30 seconds on each.

A I'm really good at the zero to one part. I think you can throw me pretty much any problem inside the company and I could get you to a version of product market fit there. I'm a product guy. I've kind of done product things over the last decade, but in that notion, I'm doing everything except And I think I can get ramped up really fast and solve company problems. I'm probably not the best at scaling, so the one to 10 is probably something that I don't enjoy as much. I probably get bored, and so the way I've solved that for myself over the last few years has just been surrounding myself with people who are extremely good at scaling.

AI assessment note: “I'm really good at the zero to one part... I'm probably not the best at scaling”

Q What does it help most? Talent? Customer acquisition? Pure brand and market and ego? What is the thing that is the needle mover for?

A I think the thing I would say about Sequoia, having gotten to work with them more in the last few years is that, you know, similar to how we demand excellence from our, from our employees, I think they demand excellence from their companies. If you like that pressure, if you like wanting to build a generational company, I think you get the best, you know, set of questions from them. You get a lot of really, Sort of nuanced feedback and data points from them. Um, you know, right now we work with Pat Grady. I mean, Pat has seen literally every like generational SaaS company closely, like really closely, right? Like he could basically like, and everything is memory. So he can essentially tell you, you are where, you know, ServiceNow was like, 12 years and two quarters ago, right? And I think I think it's like, he's seen the movie so many different times.

AI assessment note: “You get a lot of really, Sort of nuanced feedback and data points”

Q How did you see it hurt you? Inability to hire people, the people did not having direction. What was it that was, ah, this is hurting us?

A You know, the way we looked at it was just the percentage of business that is driven by sales or sales assisted wasn't growing as much as we would have hoped. Um, But you know, there's a, there's actually an interesting piece here around sales at product-led growth companies, right? Uh, which is that I think, you know, in many ways, product sells itself, uh, at these companies and, and, and you think you can do sales a slightly different way because you have all these leads, right? And, and that actually is, is also a blessing and a curse. Yes, it's a blessing because you have all these leads, but it's also a curse because I think your broader team starts to depend on it. It's like, oh, the product is not really signing up the right lead. This is why I'm not able to close sales, right? Which if you didn't have the product, if you didn't have anybody signing up on your website, you would still be doing, you know, going out and trying to find the lead. And so you'd be, you know, you'd be sort of, uh, complaining about that part a bit less.

AI assessment note: “percentage of business that is driven by sales or sales assisted wasn't growing”

Q Just thought, thought exercise here. Is that not when you get more aggressive? Your competitors, we won't name because, you know, I don't want to upset anyone, but, uh, they don't have actually the cash supplies that you do in a lot of respects. You could have gone aggressive them when they pulled back. Did you think about that?

A We did do some of that, and I think the reason we were able to do some of that was because we were already cashful positive. So we saw all the companies around us all trying to get fit, all trying to get back to cashful positive, and we, we were like, we're already there, so what do we do? Through all of these things, one thing I realized, it's actually, there's There's, like, 99 ways you can burn money. There's only one good way to, like, effectively, like, make money, right? There's just, like, so many bad ideas out there. You can, like, throw money on the billboards. You can throw money on YouTube. But I think it's, like, it's actually very few ideas that actually can, like, continue to scale well. And even when it starts to do well, like, you put more money in and it starts to be a bad channel, right? So, so it's actually kind of an interesting, um, exercise of, like, You know, if, if something works for X, like, how do you get to 10 X and still have the same unit economics? It's pretty hard.

AI assessment note: “We did do some of that, and I think the reason we were able to do”

Q kind of the rollout of that. I do want to ask you, because you mentioned kind of the rebundling-bundling,, and with that, you covered just such a broad, Swatheed in terms of kind of the customer population, and you have this unique vantage point in terms of how teams behave and operate. And so what have been some of your core observations as people move to remote work fundamentally overnight?

A Yeah, this isn't a really odd our time to be building a collaboration tool, because at one hand, we are building a tool that so many people are using to do their work, but on the other hand, like we've all been pushed into probably the biggest A-B AB experiment of our lives, where we all have to work From our homes. And ironically, like, you know, we're building a tool that is so useful for distributed teams, but Notion as a company, we're only 40 people, so we very much focused on building this small team in our small office in San Francisco, and we had never really worked distributedly before. So it's been a great experiment, and it's actually forced a lot of our thinking, and we've gotten more empathy around just how people work distributedly. And it turns out that, I think, as Sarah mentioned, like, Slack and Zoom are fantastic for Synchronous communication that allows you to just chat real time or talk real time or video. But a big portion that's left out from that is actually doing your work, like actually writing documents, like actually being able to collaborate on that and see real time how people think and what kind of ideas they have. And this is where Notion becomes really handy. Because we're a small team, we actually put almost half of our team working on features that allows people to be more productive in this unique environment. I think two weeks ago, we launch…

AI assessment note: “Slack and Zoom are fantastic for Synchronous communication that allows you to just chat”

Q What does being cashflow positive mean you have done that you wouldn't have done if you weren't cashflow positive? Like what has it enabled you?

A It's a huge, like once you get there, it's actually a, a huge time save. So I think I'll just talk a little bit about notions, very nuanced, but we got there pretty early. I think we got there like five years ago. What it did was it meant that suddenly you feel in control of your destiny. You don't have to think about, you don't, you don't have an end date, right? You, you don't feel like you're going to run out of money in X months or X years, Y years away. And what that means is you can choose to raise money if you have a good need for it. But you don't have to. Uh, so all the time spent there could be spent back into building a better product and, and selling to customers.

AI assessment note: “all the time spent there could be spent back into building a better product”

Q We mentioned Pat. We mentioned index. We mentioned code too. When investors invest and lead and write big checks, they generally get board seats. You did boards a little bit differently. How did you do a board differently actually?

A Well, I think like, you know, we talked about these rounds. These rounds were, uh, fairly Low dilution. I think there's essentially two to three percent ownership, um, that we, that we, we gave out. Uh, and so, you know, we were able to essentially, um, not give out board seats. I don't think it came from, like, a place of arrogance, but I think it just, it, it just, like, we were able to do it in a way that, um, that, that, that sort of, like, felt like we could almost recruit a board In the future, which we wanted to do, not just because someone is investing money, but someone who could be a long-term sort of board member for us.

AI assessment note: “we were able to essentially, um, not give out board seats.”

Q What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

A One of the things, uh, I think my wife was right on this one, one of the things I used to do about a year or two was try to, like, pack up every hour of my kids' weekend, uh, with, like, activities, and I was like, oh, they can't be bored, like, they gotta do this, they gotta do that, and then, you know, we just spent, like, a month in India this summer, And they had no programming, and they were just, like, sitting around with family, and in many cases, my, my daughter complained she was bored, but I think, I don't know, I think, I, I think both of them grew so much with all these interactions, and I've realized that, you know, you don't, I don't know, boredom is good. Like, I think it's okay for them to, like, just, you know, uh, not be, like, occupied every hour of Of the, of the day.

AI assessment note: “I've realized that, you know, you don't, I don't know, boredom is good.”

Q When was that moment when you realized that?

A Probably, like, three years in, so that, that would have been, like, three years ago. Um, we've obviously now moved very much into, like, you know, we have an incredible new sales leader, Pravesh, who comes from, like, uh, you know, an enterprise sales background, and I think he's brought Certain amount of energy and DNA that, like, I didn't have, right? Uh, that's, that's the, that's the other thing. It's like, you need someone who can really rally the troops and operate a slightly different way, rather than like a systems builder, product thinker. Like, doesn't work. Like, you know, I, I can't stand on the stage of sales kickoff and like rally the troops as much as Pravesh can. And, and I think if you're like a sales account executive, you, you need, you want to see that. You want to see that. You want to see that you're, Crushing your quotas and you're, you know, you're really, you're really building for that. And so, so if I had to do, I used to back to your question, if I had to do it one function all over again, I would do sales. And the way I would do it is to not try to like overthink it, just do it the way it is run, like a proper sales machine. I think it would have saved three years, uh, in that journey. So that part, that part is painful.

AI assessment note: “Probably, like, three years in, so that, that would have been, like, three years ago.”

Q When was that moment when you realized that?

A Probably, like, three years in, so that, that would have been, like, three years ago. Um, we've obviously now moved very much into, like, you know, we have an incredible new sales leader, Pravesh, who comes from, like, uh, you know, an enterprise sales background, and I think he's brought Certain amount of energy and DNA that, like, I didn't have, right? Uh, that's, that's the, that's the other thing. It's like, you need someone who can really rally the troops and operate a slightly different way, rather than like a systems builder, product thinker. Like, doesn't work. Like, you know, I, I can't stand on the stage of sales kickoff and like rally the troops as much as Pravesh can. And, and I think if you're like a sales account executive, you, you need, you want to see that. You want to see that. You want to see that you're, Crushing your quotas and you're, you know, you're really, you're really building for that. And so, so if I had to do, I used to back to your question, if I had to do it one function all over again, I would do sales. And the way I would do it is to not try to like overthink it, just do it the way it is run, like a proper sales machine. I think it would have saved three years, uh, in that journey. So that part, that part is painful.

AI assessment note: “Probably, like, three years in, so that, that would have been, like, three years ago.”

Q Just thought, thought exercise here. Is that not when you get more aggressive? Your competitors, we won't name because, you know, I don't want to upset anyone, but, uh, they don't have actually the cash supplies that you do in a lot of respects. You could have gone aggressive them when they pulled back. Did you think about that?

A We did do some of that, and I think the reason we were able to do some of that was because we were already cashful positive. So we saw all the companies around us all trying to get fit, all trying to get back to cashful positive, and we, we were like, we're already there, so what do we do? Through all of these things, one thing I realized, it's actually, there's There's, like, 99 ways you can burn money. There's only one good way to, like, effectively, like, make money, right? There's just, like, so many bad ideas out there. You can, like, throw money on the billboards. You can throw money on YouTube. But I think it's, like, it's actually very few ideas that actually can, like, continue to scale well. And even when it starts to do well, like, you put more money in and it starts to be a bad channel, right? So, so it's actually kind of an interesting, um, exercise of, like, You know, if, if something works for X, like, how do you get to 10 X and still have the same unit economics? It's pretty hard.

AI assessment note: “We did do some of that, and I think the reason we were able”